Perhaps the greatest difference between poetry and philosophy is the manner in which they both are delivered to their intended audiences. Poetry comes to us typically in verse, with alliterative language, where greater power comes in the artful assembly of words to paint images that, when received, illicit various emotions in us. Philosophy, at the risk of using a sweeping generalization, tends to be more critical than artful. Its power comes in the depositing of ideas, their definitions according to the philosopher, and (if in a dialectic) a back-and-forth play of reasoned accounting. Both poetry and philosophy endeavor to convey a message, to be sure, but poety is far more engaging in its use of the language. It could even be said that poetry goes out of its way to be creative, artful, even obscure. Philosophy attempts to be direct as possible, even if the text itself can at times be so challenging as to be unapproachable to the layman.
Striking similarities do exist. The most prominent of which would be in how the poet and the philosopher are both trying to describe things (emotions and ideas) that do not necessarily lend themselves easily to the restrictions of our language. As I mentioned in class, reading Stevens, for example, frustrated me the same way a car does that rides perfectly for miles, then sputters and coughs, and then clears itself out and rides smoothly again. You keep driving on, but not without scowling and saying "What the hell was that?" Likewise, in reading Stevens or Descartes or James, I find myself driving forward through the text when, suddenly, the words begin to sputter and cough. As with driving, your endeavor is to get to where you're going lest you get stranded. I find myself stopping in the text to check under the hood, more often than not having no clue what I'm looking for. Poets and philosophers are handcuffed by the language. Each grasps for the meanings of things but inevitably comes up short, leaving us readers to do our best to interpret.
I do agree with you, and I like your example of the car which sputters and coughs to illustrate the reading of a philosophical text. Because sometimes (or even often) reading such a text can be hard to fully understand and we have to think and to question ourselves to be sure that we got the meaning of it.
ReplyDeleteI also think that poetry is a way to express ideas in a shorter way and in a more attractive way than a philosophical text. Nonetheless, shorter does not necessarily mean easier to understand (i.e.with Gertrude Stein).
In your last sentence you say that "leaving us, readers to do our best to interpret."
I think you are right, interpretation of a poem or a text plays an important part.
If I say that interpretation is one of the aims of both philosophy and poetry, do you think so as well?